


reach inside, just to find my heart is beating

by SbiderSlut (BlackCoffeeCat)



Series: Sbider's Tony Stark Bingo 2019 [5]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Character Study, Gen, Natasha Romanov & Tony Stark Friendship, Natasha Romanov Feels, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Not A Fix-It, Red Room (Marvel), Symbolism, Time Skips, Tony Stark Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-29
Updated: 2019-04-29
Packaged: 2020-02-07 07:09:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18615664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackCoffeeCat/pseuds/SbiderSlut
Summary: Natalia is fourteen, and then sixteen, and nineteen, and twenty-one.Natasha is twenty-two, then twenty-four and meeting the puzzle that is Tony Stark for the first time.---Or: a survey of Natalia Romanova over the years, and her complicated relationship with one Anthony Stark.---Fill for Tony Stark Bingo 2019 (R5 - Natasha Romanoff)





	reach inside, just to find my heart is beating

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Squidlywinks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Squidlywinks/gifts).



> Whelp. I had this draft written up to the ending of Infinity War for the longest time, but never had the balls to upload it. And now that Endgame has come out, I've felt inspired to just extend this so that it includes Endgame and gives myself some goddamn closure and comfort after these two both bite the dust.
> 
> Title from Bleeding Out by Imagine Dragons.

One Mediterranean summer when pomegranates are ripe and abundant, Natalia, fourteen, is sent to where the weather is balmy, and the food, rich. She doesn’t eat bread the entire summer -- not when that, cabbage, and potatoes were all she’s eaten in her short years of life.

She gorges herself while she can. She gorges herself as she takes her first, bleeding steps into womanhood, and she feeds these sudden pangs for lush tastes because the opportunity is as fleeting as the warmth of July. She allows herself these small lapses in discipline: pulpy, syrupy apricot juice and ripe, dripping peaches and the most pungent of antipasti. Olives, cheeses, meats. Figs that are so sweet her teeth ache to the roots. The heaviest and fleshiest of grapes.

One afternoon, as she passes by a grocer, she sees a stand of them, large and red and luscious. Pomegranates. Fat ruby spheres, like an obscenely giant jewel. She’s utterly entranced. Never has Natalia seen something so unapologetically ruby red and large and loud in its bold colors. She’s never seen such a striking red without the usually deathly implications.

She buys one. She takes it back to her little closet of a residence, and palms the fruit as if she’s cradling a fragile world between her bony, thin hands that haven’t touched such vibrant life in their entire bloody existence.

Just like all life, she ends it in her hands.

 _A pomegranate is like a woman,_ she thinks.

 _A pomegranate is like a woman_ \-- Natalia scales the rough skin of the fruit with precision until there are six shallow lines running vertically. _It bleeds how a woman bleeds._ With controlled pressure, she snaps the fruit into sections of blood red jewels tucked between layers of flimsy skin. Gushes of juice drip out of slaughtered seeds like dark blood, staining alabaster skin. Some stay intact.

_The jewels inside are firm, but plump. Soft in the outer layers, but with hardness inside. Each one contains a seed, a potential to create._

One by one, Natalia pops the seeds in her mouth, breaking through giving flesh and the tart bite of a rush of juices to crunch through the tough seed inside. She greedily laps the red off her lips and fingers as they drip, and thinks of how fragile a pomegranate is. How fragile life is.

How fragile being a woman in this world is.

Two days later, she spills real blood as she ends the life of her mark -- a woman entirely undeserving, but that means nothing to the collective good of the motherland. Knowledge, as innocently carried as it is, can mean a merciless death sentence.

Natalia splits this woman’s body, too. She breaks it in pieces, and dumps them.

And she starts to think that all good life must die. Pomegranate or human, man or woman, the vibrant and unapologetic are meant to be ripped apart and consumed.

\---

She is sixteen. Like a budding fruit, she grows.

Natalia’s limbs are first; they extend out, long and lanky. Growing pains makes her grit her teeth most nights, and her skin seems to stretch in little lines of white that disappear as she acclimates. The spurt leaves her with a fair height and a slim figure.

But then, she grows fullness where women are full. Her body adjusts to her height. Budding breasts come -- small at first, but blooming overnight. _Bad genetics_ , she heard the mistresses whisper. _Unfortunate_.

Her thighs thicken out -- good and strong. Her shoulders grow broader, but graceful. Her neck remains long and her head high. She fights, successfully, battle after battle, training after training, even as she is battered. She excels. She becomes the deadliest of her cohort.

But that can’t save her from her own body. That can’t stop the doctors, with their sleeping drugs, with their sharp gleaming scalpels, with their cold experiments and procedures meant to create a better Union.

They ruin her, first, in the deepest way a woman can be ruined. Ugly hands clench around the circumference of her graceful neck and squeeze nearly all the life out of her. Systemically, the most brutal or warriors are sicced on her with the express purpose to break her.

(It’s a part of the process, they all say. A rite of passage. Soldiers are the tool, but the organization is her assailant.)

Her body, still growing, is invaded with agonizing force. Her voice is choked from her, and her limbs flail until they are too weak to continue, and blood drips from where it hurts the most, and all she can think about is that stupid fruit with its bloody juices dripping down her arm and staining her own skin, and how it tasted on her tongue, bursting with sweetness and sourness and an angry, bitter bite that was unique to the fruit.

She’s squeezed and violently burst, like one of the ruby red seeds she popped between her teeth, except she can’t find the solid core inside herself, can’t find the strength and hardness buried under giving flesh. All she feels is soft, empty, and finished.

She’s sixteen, she is alone, and she feels like there’s nothing left.

(She wakes, two weeks later, lighter in the breasts, shut down in her womb, and feeling scraped hollow. She’s dead, she thinks. Scraped empty, like she’d scraped that pomegranate. All that’s left is a shell.)

(So, she fills that shell with steel.)

\---

She is nineteen and fighting alongside the _Ziminiy Soldat_. He’s empty, too.

Neither of them is living. They simply function. Two guns, two shells filled with steel.

He malfunctions, he’s taken away.

Natalia doesn’t mourn; there’s nothing left in her to mourn, she thinks. The pangs which bounce in her as she continues to function are simply due to the unforgiving Siberian winter. Machines get chills.

Natalia keeps functioning -- hard, and steel, and unliving, and grey.

\---

She is twenty-one, and she is caught.

Already, life has gotten tiring. She’s exhausted.

Barton finds her.

He feeds her an orange -- tart and juicy. He cuts it in wedges for her as he sits across the interrogation table. Under his orders, she’s given just enough slack in the chains keeping her hands hostage so that she can feed herself.

It’s more consideration than she’s been shown in a long time.

They keep her many nights. Barton brings her apples. And more oranges. And a bundle of bananas; _potassium,_ he says, _is good for preventing leg cramps._

As if leg cramps would bother Natalia. She’s held out under a thousand times the pain of a leg cramp. She can hold up under most tortures.

Still, she gives in to Barton, his agency, and his American fruits.

\---

Natalia is twenty-two, and she becomes Natasha.

\---

And then, and then, and then.

\---

Natasha is twenty-four. She sees Tony Stark, and she thinks that this is a man who is dying, but desperate to die vibrantly. This is a man who’s seeing his insides fall apart, except he doesn’t want to fill himself with steel to preserve it. He lets himself break and burst, in both the most magnificent and hideous of ways.

She can understand him because she reads people -- that’s what she does. But, she can’t _understand_ him. Can’t understand how he can tolerate being so fallible and soft and disgustingly human. Someone is going to crush him in their hands -- just like she did with a pomegranate in a sticky-hot summer in Italy which feels more like a distant dream than a memory.

That’s Natalia’s memory, and she is Natasha, with a mission and a very messy man to spy on. A very messy man that, against all her valiant efforts, is annoyingly likable.

She watches Stark, and she waits and waits and waits, and she expects (hopes?) that he’ll figure out what Fury is dropping like a puzzle or a meager trail of breadcrumbs.

As if his life were worth little more than a nifty problem to solve.

(But Natasha is a core of steel, unlike Stark, so she has no true opinion.)

He solves it.

She evaluates him.

 _Not recommended_.

She can’t take someone like him on the team. They want a team of steel -- they want Iron Man.

But Tony Stark? Too breakable.

(Turns out, pomegranates aren’t just women and young Russian girls. They’re also older men, jaded with a life of misfortunes and betrayal, yet willing to give the world another chance.)

They don’t need someone so breakable on their team, Natasha tells herself. That’s why. That’s why she wants him off the team.

(Certainly, it’s not because she doesn’t want to see Tony Stark split the way the pomegranate was. The way Natalia was, at so young. It’s certainly not that.)

\---

They end up on the same team, anyways.

Natasha learns she’s not as much steel as she had hoped -- first when Barton vanishes, then when she sees the limp shell of Iron Man raining out of the sky. A heart she forgot she had kicks into an uncomfortable gear.

She looks at her teammates. She looks at Stark, all bruised and battered inside the dinky shell of his battle-worn suit, and thinks that maybe they don’t want all steel. They’re all soft, in their own odd ways. Maybe there’s something to being soft.

Maybe she can be, just a little bit.

(Fury asks her if she plans on staying, giving her an out.)

(She stays.)

\---

The Malibu mansion topples over the edge of California while Natasha is away on assignment. It can’t be helped. She finishes her mission, because even if she were to fly back, Stark is already MIA. All she can do is hope that he’s not a dead, crushed body in the bottom of the blue Pacific ocean.

He makes it. He comes back, and he’s destroyed all his suits and his reactor, and he’s more _Tony_ than Natasha has ever seen.

“Glad you’re alive, Stark,” Natasha says, when she sees him again, weeks after his surgery.

“Me, too,” Stark says, though his eyes are inexplicably wary. “Too bad Iron Man is gone, though.”

Oh. _Oh._

 _Tony Stark: Not Recommended_.

“No,” Natasha says, and she finds that she means it. “Nothing to cry about. Just a tin can. Right, Tony?”

 _Tony_ smiles, then, and the universe around them shifts, just the tiniest of degrees. “Right, Nat.”

\---

Hydra falls.

S.H.I.E.L.D. implodes, flooding the internet with _everything_.

Natasha entire cover crumbles. Both _Ziminiy Soldat_ and _Natalia_ leap out of the ground like shadows, and with both _literal_ and figurative ghosts biting at her heels, Natasha retreats.

She retreats to Tony in his iron fortress, and he takes her in without a moment of hesitation. Without the faintest hint of condescension or pity.

For the first time, Natasha seeks shelter somewhere, and doesn’t feel _lesser_ for doing it.

\---

Tony cleans up her mess without being asked, knowing that nothing in the world could make her ask him.

Tony drives her to and from Capitol Hill. He simply asks, “when are you due?” and starts up his Audi early the morning of her hearing to get her to DC -- it’s a four to five-hour drive from the city. She wears the Black Widow like a veil; she sends the press and Congress reeling with her cutthroat exterior, and she owns the room she occupies because that’s what she’s trained to do.

The inside of the Audi smells grossly like coffee and McDonald’s when she slides back in, and just like that, the veil is shed.

Tony feeds her greasy fast food and coffee with too much cream and sugar, and Natasha lets the Widow wash away -- she lets herself relax and swing her feet up onto the dash, and Tony cues up some obnoxious music and talks her ear off about one thing or another.

He knows her, better than she’d ever willingly allow anyone to know her.

Natasha’s whole life has been a long practice in getting better and better at reading people. She’s trained for that, so she can be the most efficient killer possible. Then, an agent -- still a killer, but for a different master. (And she’s not so sure who’s left to serve, now that S.H.I.E.L.D. is gone. She’s floundering and it sickens her.)

But Tony -- he reads people, too. Taught by the media, and maybe the too-harsh hand of a failure of a father, he looks at people and knows what makes them tick and tock. What will destroy someone, and what will butter them up. Those instincts have helped him with his sexual conquests, sure, but also the business he’s conducted. Even before Pepper, Tony was securing deals and charming powerful individuals, left and right.

He’s played the world into his hands.

And yet, he remains so… unguarded. Soft. He opened his home to them. He foots their bills, and cracks jokes, and gifts away shards of his heart. There’s such a vulnerability to him.

It’s terrifying to behold.

(Natasha’s seen that same vulnerability in other people. And she’s seen them snapped and strangled like a snake and mouse. She’d been the snake before -- she’d taken advantage of vulnerability many, many times.)

She looks at Tony, and thinks that she can see the moment he will break. She dreads that day.

\---

Tony asks her if she’d like to stay. She accepts.

He shows her to the room she’s had, all along.

Natasha stays, for longer than she ever intends to.

\---

Generosity is a limitless concept, with Tony. For a oxymoron of a man who is emotionally constipated, yet such a bleeding heart, he’s perfected his methods of showing his regard.

He buys them and equips them past the point of excess. He uses his infinite resources and means -- not money nor power, but his universe of a mind -- to accomplish things for each and every Avenger, without asking.

He… becomes Iron Man again. ( _That_ , in particular, sits low in Natasha’s gut like a heavy bullet.) Because the team needs him. Because, with Hydra loose, the world needs him. He breaks his resolutions for the only reason he would ever break them -- for a greater good he’s already nearly given everything to, multiple times.

For Natasha? Tony wipes as much of her from the internet as he can. He builds her suits and gadgets, and though he always gifts them with a rambling scientific spiel meant to to come across as a cross between nerdy pride and flawed ego (just as manufactured as his suits), Natasha can feel the desperation and earnest love with which they are created when she holds them in her hands.

She can hear the desperate prayers to a god none of them believe in -- the prayers of a man who has already seen too many loved ones die.

(The worst nightmares which haunt Tony Stark are too easy and heartbreaking of a guess for those who know him.)

Tony gives, and gives, and gives, trinkets and time and thoughts which are all intertwined with fragments of himself and his mind, thin golden threads mingling with the fabric of what he weaves so intricately.

Natasha endeavors to treat these pieces of Tony gently; she can’t speak for all of her teammates, but _she_ does. And if she were less subtle of a person than she knows how to be, she would have policed them, as well.

But she is not and will never that person, _even_ when it comes to Tony.

(For him, though? She may actually regret it.)

The most precious thing he gives her is his trust. Even with how she entered his life, Tony somehow decides she’s a worthy confidante, and she slowly hears about him through his own words -- about the figure of steel Howard Stark was, and the Italian warmth of his mother when she was attentive enough to show it. About the tangled gossamer of complexities he carries when it comes to his parents.

(He does love them, though. In his own, slightly mangled way. He loves them, and Natasha doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to determine if Howard and Maria deserve that love.)

(That look in his eyes, when he talks about them -- he wears it for her, sometimes. He wears it for all of them. For Pepper, Rhodey, Happy. It comes in flashes like lightning across the sky, and every time she’s blinded by it, she glimpses herself at fourteen again, sitting on the floor of her dingy apartment and cradling a pomegranate in her palm. She doesn’t believe in any god -- there’s nothing she knows more than that she’s alone in the world; they’re all alone in the world -- but she prays that Tony won’t be split down the middle and devoured. And she prays that if someone tries, she’ll be around to stop it.)

\---

Ultron is a disaster, start to finish.

She loses Bruce. The team fractures. Steve blindly attacks with his shield and shows his hand -- namely, his lack of trust in Tony. There is a literal beatdown in Tony’s workshop while Natasha is locked in Sokovia -- one she is helpless to diffuse.

(Learning about it, later, she feels a low blow in her gut, both regret and relief, because that’s not a sight she would have enjoyed witnessing or participating in, yet she despises that Tony was the target of such inhuman aggression, enacted without the full story.)

The remaining Maximoff is integrated to the team, and seeing the girl fills Natasha with a sense of understanding, yet a bitter resentment for the cruel images the young witch had cast over her, over the team, over _Tony._ Her new Avenger status is distasteful, in so many different ways.

If Natasha hadn’t built her life on withstanding discomfort and adapting to distasteful circumstances, she would have left the team. But she stays, because she’s not a runner.

And, she keeps a close eye on the spiraling teenage girl, knowing that she’s going to blow up like a bomb at some point. And it’ll be her own fault because she’s reckless with a loose moral compass, but also not -- her entire being reeks of the tragedy she’s been unfairly subjected to.

(Children who aren’t allowed proper development become adults who are stunted in the very things they were denied. Natasha is a cautionary tale. And so is Wanda. In that way, they’re eerily similar.)

So, for more reasons than she can being to explain, Natasha stays.

In just as many ways as they’re alike, Tony is also not like her.

After the world is saved, Tony runs.

\---

Actually, that’s not all.

Tony seeks her out, first. Expresses his condolences for Bruce’s disappearance, even though Natasha can see the same betrayal reflected in his face. Bruce had abandoned both of them -- one dear friend and one _more than something_.

Out of all the Avengers, it hits them the most.

They fix drinks together, alone, at night, in the half-built living room of the compound with its giant glass window. Between a combination of the booze, the booming traquility of upstate at midnight, the stars which feel uncomfortably close and impossibly far at the same time, and the witching hour of the night, Natasha ends up telling him.

Everything.

That summer in Italy, the pomegranate, her adolescence in the Red Room. The story of Natalia.

Tony listens, and he knows her well enough that there’s no _thank you_ when she’s finished, no expressed appreciation for her divulged secrets. He doesn’t make anything of it -- knowing how raw and vulnerable this conscious choice is for her. He knows not to address it. Instead, his genius brain with its overfiring neurons reads right into the heart of what she’s saying.

“I’m not afraid of you tearing me apart,” he says. “I’m not afraid of you.”

He doesn’t reciprocate the promise to handle Natasha with care -- that’s not the point of the story. Natasha hasn’t been a pomegranate for decades. She’s not sure what she is, but whatever she is certainly isn’t soft, nor tearable, nor vibrant and sweet. Whatever she is, she’s hard and contained. Compact. Bitter and metallic to the taste. Tony doesn’t write her off by pretending otherwise.

It’s absolution.

No, her ledger isn’t cleaned -- it remains just as gushing red as Loki had observed three years in the past. But Tony looks right at the gushing red, truly sees everything laid out in its gory glory, and doesn’t blanch away.

(Once upon a time, he’d been the Merchant of Death, Natasha reminds himself.)

Turns out, absolution from someone who recognizes sin, themselves, rings truer than if she were to lay down her gun and become a nun. Absolution from someone who knows her -- from her polished surface to her most heinous, cobwebbed corners -- _actually_ means something.

“I know you’re not staying,” Natasha tells him, in return, instead of any thanks.

Because Tony knows her, but she also knows him; he doesn’t want her thanks and appreciation for his acceptance -- not when he hungers for people who allow him the opportunity to accept them. “I understand.”

Tony falters. “I can’t. Not after -- ”

“I understand,” Natasha repeats, again. “It’s okay. I get it.”

_I know how it feels to need to get away._

And so, Tony runs.

\---

If only that were it. Natasha wishes it were so -- that she and Tony part with a mutual understanding, and he goes to live his quiet life with Pepper. She’d seen the way -- so full of yearning -- that he’d regarded Clint, Laura, and their quiet farm. He more than deserves that.

And of course, they'd maintain this regard they have for one another.

(As for Natasha? She simply resolves to do what she knows best, because it’d be pure foolishness think there’s anything else in her future. Simply having _people_ of her own, having someone who knows her to the depth that Tony does and who still will have her, is more than she’d ever ask for.)

But, the Accords descend upon them. Nigeria happens. Ross pushes his way in and gets involved. Their hands are forced, the UN Summit gets bombed, and then, and then, and then.

( _You all right?_ )

( _Always._ )

In the span of thirty-six hours, too much gets broken.

They’re all left reeling, struggling to choose sides.

Natasha’s signature sits on legal documents, but her mind is elsewhere.

More than anything, she just wants the fighting to end. And she knows Steve -- the man is blind in his convictions. He’ll do whatever it takes, break whoever he has to, just to follow his own, sometimes flawed sense of justice. With Barnes -- and a deep part of herself will never be able to separate him from the cold, wintery assassin she’s trained with in another lifetime -- at his side, they’ll break everyone around them before they’re through.

So, she lets them go.

(She wants them away. Let them do what they want, she thinks. If they’re far away, there’ll be peace. If they’re far away, more people won’t get hurt.)

(Rhodey is already one casualty too many. Who would have been next? Tony, who’s been hurt far too many times already? The spider child, too young and innocent for their battles? Clint, with a full family waiting for him at home?)

She makes the decision which will keep the most people alive and unharmed.

In the process, she breaks a piece of Tony’s heart.

This time, Natasha is the one who runs.

\---

_It must be hard to shake the whole double agent thing, huh? Sticks in the DNA._

Not that she will ever admit it, but the words sting. They resonate somewhere deep, and she has no choice but to remove herself -- bite out some spiteful words of her own, tuck tail, and leave.

It’s funny -- plenty of things scare her or chill her in the bones. You don’t become a master-class assassin without learning reasonable fear of more powerful entities. But, few people can faze her the way Tony Stark can; few people can reach into her and probe at that one, tiny spot of life she has left inside her and wrench all of these _feelings_ out.

So, she hurts him, too. There’s more softness and life to him than to her, and as she storms off, she already regrets it.

\---

She _doesn’t_ regret not lingering around for Ross to lock her up deep. She doesn’t regret it, because she sees the look Tony levels her with, and knows that he wouldn’t have bothered to visit her anytime soon -- the hurt is too fresh, still.

He may not ever forgive her. He may not ever trust her again. The fact that he did trust her, after learning the truth of their first meetings, is already astounding. The fact that she was allowed a second chance is miraculous.

Natasha tries not to, but she mourns the loss as she lays low in Wakanda for an interim, just until they get back on their feet and can all run off into hiding. T’Challa’s hospitality can only extend so far for them -- his hands are tied as the leader of a nation which is finally emerging onto the global map of politics. There’s too much at risk.

After the Accords, she can’t quite look at Steve the same way -- she'll never be able to look at him and realize she'd trusted him to be forthright with his teammates, and he'd kept such a dark secret for his own benefit. She’s never been able to look at Wanda without seeing the ghosts which haunt Tony, and she still can't.

Clint takes a deal which Tony secures for him. So does Scott. Sam is fine, but he's Steve's friend, first.

So, Natasha spends a lot of time on her own.

The lack of mission or much to do would have driven her crazy, if discipline and control weren’t the first traits beat into her as a child.

Silently, she bears witness to the passage of time, and more often than not, thinks of Tony Stark and how he’s doing up in his lonely, lonely tower.

\---

She won’t admit to missing things, ever -- not the way a child misses a sentimental object. It’s not for her. It’s simply not something she does.

But, she comes close.

\---

T’Challa personally brings it to her, two days before she’s set to depart Wakanda. “This was delivered for you,” he says, formally, and hands her a small parcel package wrapped up in bubble wrap and a yellow envelope.

T’Challa puts space between them as she arbitrarily inspects the package -- he tends to do that now. He keeps his distance from her, remaining civil and more hospitable than Natasha deserves, but formal. After everything, she can hardly blame him.

This time, T’Challa regards her with a inscrutable look. “This will not reach the news for a few weeks, but I was granted permission to share the news with you.”

It’s likely she would discover whatever it is sooner or later -- she has good venues of intelligence, still. She’s resourceful, still. But, she nods.

“Tony Stark and Pepper Potts are engaged. Their wedding is set for roughly two summers from now.”

“Thank you, your majesty,” she says, and after T’Challa leaves -- when she’s fully and undoubtedly alone -- she smiles.

Good for him. He deserves to have a piece of happiness in his life. After everything that’s been wrung out of him, he deserves this.

Natasha opens the package with deft fingers sliding under tape, and feels her heart falter once when she cracks open a slim, velvet box.

A pomegranate. Tiny, and tasteful, and metal, with a garnet embedded in it, hanging from the thinnest of chains. Simply because it came from Tony Stark, and because it’s intended for her, she knows that the chain would be deceptively strong.

She picks up the gift and holds it to the light, taking note of the way the metal glimmers, siver, yet leaning white. She knows, without checking, that it’s a blend -- stainless steel, titanium, and palladium. An alloy of the strongest, hardest, of metals.

Assassins who are barely human don’t wear jewelry. They don’t keep items out memory. She’d never learned sentimentalism as a child, and she doesn’t mean to, now.

She slips the necklace on.

\---

She means to talk to Tony. She really does. She means to send an olive branch to him and repair some of what’s been broken.

Uncharacteristically, and against everything she’s been taught and holds on to, she intends to express her regrets to the man. Lay aside her ego that she’d accused him of having and admit where she went wrong.

Tony deserves that.

But, life gets in the way. She wears the tiny steel pomegranate tucked close against her chest, goes on the run, and spends the next two years surviving with teammates who only serve to remind her of one who’s not at her side.

She really intends to, though.

\---

Then, Tony is vanishing into the atmosphere (sure, nobody knows for sure, but Natasha _knows_ ) and everything happens at once, and all she can do is fight forth as she always does.

When in doubt, fight.

The fight ends, and half of them are gone and Natasha looks at Wanda’s ashes and Barnes’ ashes, and Vision’s grey body, and thinks, _Tony, where are you?_

If this happened... he lost. Wherever he is, he lost, too.

God knows where he is, now.

Everything is a daze, until the point that it’s not. The jungle around her becomes painfully sharp and clear, the green too vivid and the silence too deafening.

Natasha breaks -- her heart pounds, and she pants like she’s been jogging from Marathon, except the news is of defeat, not victory. She lets out an angry snarl and lashes with one fist; the cracking sound of her knuckles impacting the tree is infuriatingly dull, and the pain isn’t enough.

She didn’t have people to lose in the soul-shattering way Steve did, or the raccoon, or Okoye, or Thor. ( _God, Thor has really lost everything_ , she takes a moment to think.)

But Natasha strips off her gloves, tracks the vivid red blood which blooms from her split skin and drips down.

Natasha is thirty-two. She stands in the shadow of defeat. She thinks of who’s missing from her side.

And, she thinks of pomegranates.

\---

Tony comes home, thank the heavens she's never believed in, and he's utterly ravaged by grief and rage. He spits barbs at all of them and they let him. 

Natasha watches the raving madness in those sharp eyes and the ladder of his ribs showing underneath his shirt collar, and lets him. She lets him spew venom, and thinks,  _I regret that you lost alone._

He leaves, and she lets him. 

What else can she offer him? 

\---

She wears his necklace under her clothes, as the years tick by. The two trinkets Natasha keeps to herself -- an arrow and a pomegranate -- tangle constantly in a mess of delicate chains, and she doesn't care. She searches for one of her people, returning the favor of bringing a lost soul home, because he's one person she can save from a miserable existence. She hunts for Clint.

Tony? He thrives, as much as someone with his truckload of experiences can. He raises his family. He doesn't need her to save him -- she'd failed him when he needed her, and now he doesn't need her.

She lets Tony alone to his oasis of a farm and his little happy ending because he's owed it by the universe.

She stands to the side as he creates his family which includes none of them. 

It's not a great feeling. Natasha learns to cry, much faster than she's comfortable with, and she quickly becomes familiar with the sharp ache in her chest and the tearing sensation when sobs hitch. The burning of tears and the sourness in her throat becomes all too common. 

And sometimes, she thinks of him, when the sting of tears come.

\---

Lunch is tense. Scott is visibly fraught with resentment, and Steve is somber and Natasha wishes she could tell him to put away that bit of judgment he can't seem to tuck away. It feels wrong to bring into Tony's haven. 

Natasha sits in her seat and eats food she probably doesn't deserve in a spot that she doesn't belong in, making what small talk she can.

Composting, the weather, books. Fuck, it's surreal. 

Morgan, from her seat, pipes up, "Are you Nat?" 

She'd been introduced as Natasha, only. Miss Natasha. 

Natasha swallows. "Yes, I go by Nat, sometimes. How did you know?" 

Guilelessly, Morgan smiles. "Daddy said you teach me to fight when I'm big. And you have red hair."

Natasha looks at Tony, and he looks back; she swallows the ache in her throat, washes it down with several deep drags of ice water. 

He knows, anyways. He looks at her and knows, in that annoying way of his, and the look he gives her is the softest he's given in years. 

\---

There's no time to talk, ever. Five years is a long purgatory to bear, and for all of them, there are not enough minutes in the day to accomplish this impossible feat of a lifetime. Tony simply drives in, and they all get to work. 

But, it's the little things. She lays on a table, Bruce on the floor under her, and the next thing she knows, he's laying down next to her, genius head by her feet. She says something, and a cold hand wraps around her ankle. Squeezes once, twice -- familiar and assuring. 

Later, after they realize that some of them will return to New York -- the New York where it all started, this Avengers thing -- he pops a hip against her desk late in the night and slides a heavy glass across the table. "That was good," he says, and she clinks her glass with his. 

They both drink in solidarity. For them, New York wasn't the absolute first.

He looks at her and smiles, the lines around his eyes deep and weary, yet tender. His eyes are warmer, his demeanor far more...sentimental. 

Fatherhood is a good look on him. 

"We'll be fine," he says, taking a drag from his glass. "Whatever happens, we will be." 

And Natasha smiles. "I know." 

\---

She doesn't think about him as she falls. She takes a moment for Clint, but she doesn't think of him, because the universe is what's on her mind. 

There's a universe to save, and as she plummets, she has no room for anything other than the briefest thought to family. To friends. 

So in a sense, maybe she did think about him in those last seconds. 

Doesn't matter; he knows her. He knows how she is when there's a job -- an objective. A mission. 

He'd never begrudge her this ending. 

\---

"We did good, didn't we, Agent Romanoff? Should we clap ourselves on the back?" 

"Don't get cocky on me now, Shellhead." 

A beat. 

"...But yes. We did good." 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading, and any comments will be truly appreciated and cherished! <3 <3


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